In a blog post on Friday, Doctorow argued that the school’s motivations for gutting the program included the administration's desire to shield students from his book’s politics and content. The school’s principal, Michael J. Roberts, cited reviews that emphasized the novel's “positive view of questioning authority, lauding ‘hacker culture,’ discussing sex and sexuality in passing" as his motivation for trying to steer students clear of the book. He also said that a parent complained about profanity in the book.

Doctorow countered that there is no profanity in the book, “though there’s a reference to a swear word.” What’s more, Doctorow wrote that his publisher, Tor, has now agreed to send 200 copies of the book to the school, along with two lithograph posters containing the full text of the novel.

Doctorow's post continues to describe his motivations for freely distributing his book to the school’s students. "I think that the role of an educator is to encourage critical thinking and debate, and that this is a totally inappropriate way to address 'controversial' material in schools."

The school’s decision to gut its summer reading program of Doctorow’s book came despite the school’s extensive vetting of the novel and lack of a “formal challenge to the book and thus no reconsideration by a review committee to address the merits of the book or respond to any objections to it,” a spokesperson for the National Coalition Against Censorship explained in a letter to the school’s principal on Monday.

The book tells the story of Marcus, aka “w1n5t0n,” a seventeen-year-old who is "smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world... he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems," the book's description says. "In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself."

Further reading

How much information can a hacker obtain about your life simply by watching your Internet usage? Check out our joint reporting project with National Public Radio, in which we spied on one of their reporters for a week—and found out plenty.